Winter 2012-2013

Dean's Column

Structural and Materials Engineering Building

On Sept. 14, we celebrated the opening of our Structural and Materials Engineering building. The research laboratories, teaching facilities, and office spaces could not have come at a better time – we hired 15 new faculty members this academic year and our student enrollment is at record levels. With 5,638 undergraduates and 1,548 graduate students in Fall 2012, our enrollment is more than 1,300 students higher than it was two years ago, and more than 800 students higher than last year.

We focus on some of the great work taking place in our new building in this issue of Pulse – which will be my last issue as Dean. As you may know, I have decided to retire from UC San Diego in April 2013, after 30 years of service to the campus, including the last 10 as Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering. I will be moving to Melbourne, Australia to take an exciting position as Vice President-Academic and Dean of Engineering at Monash University. While I'll be on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, I'm not leaving the Jacobs School entirely. I will remain active as Professor and Dean Emeritus, and I believe there are a number of ways the two universities can collaborate in the future.

I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to all who have contributed their time, energy, expertise and resources to ensure the continued success of the Jacobs School. It is because of your hard work and dedication that the Jacobs School is stronger and better positioned to fulfill our mission than ever before. For example, this new building we are celebrating likely would not have come to fruition – and certainly not in this timeframe – without the hard work and support of a list of dedicated individuals that is too long to name here. The Structural and Materials Engineering building represents the exciting interdisciplinary future the Jacobs School is embarking upon. The building provides the first permanent home for the Departments of Structural Engineering and NanoEngineering. The new building also houses medical device researchers from the Institute of Engineering in Medicine.

These engineers and medical researchers share each floor with artists from the Department of Visual Arts, which occupies 20 percent of the new building. The most exciting engineering research is taking place at the interface of our traditional disciplines, and I am excited to see what will emerge when structural engineers, nanoengineers, medical device researchers and visual artists – all working at completely different scales but with the same materials – come together.

It is my hope that the next Dean of the Jacobs School will have the opportunity to dedicate a new wing of this new building (already in the master plan) – a facility that will provide space for even more extensive collaborations between engineers, physicians and other medical researchers.